The Art of a Master Daydreamer : For Bill Peet, Work Is a Flight of Fancy

Bill Peet, author of 35 illustrated storybooks, is talking about his fans, the children who have written him thousands of letters and delighted in his visits to Southern California classrooms.

“Their No. 1 question is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ and ‘How old are you?’ is probably No. 2,” Peet says with a chuckle.

“I tell them if I knew where I got the ideas, I would get ‘em faster,” he says. “I just say I get them out of thin air or I just daydream them up.”

That’s sort of true. He elaborates, recalling how he invented “Kermit the Hermit,” a greedy, grabby crab who learns generosity, after staring at crabs on ice in the supermarket and deciding they had grumpy faces, and how a gossipy old former neighbor became a hornbill bird who gossips about Hubert the lion’s lost mane in “Hubert’s Hair-Raising Adventure.” Children suggest themes, he says, but rarely usable ones.

“They say things like ‘Why don’t you write about a gorilla at the South Pole at Easter.’ It just won’t work.”

Although he sometimes goes to the zoo to watch how animals move, Peet has rarely patterned his animal characters after specific animals--with one notable exception. When his son Bill Peet Jr., a biology teacher at the Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood, ordered a special pet from an animal importer, a capybarra--a tailless, partially web-footed South American rodent that grows to about four feet in length--it became the title character of Peet’s book “Capyboppy.” In the story, as in real life, the creature grew so large and spoiled it had to be sent to the zoo.

“That thing grew at an alarming rate,” he says. “The three cats in that book were ours, too. They didn’t know quite what to make of it.”

Another of his book ideas grew out of his classroom chats with young readers. Typically, he would begin to sketch an animal with the children gathered around him, challenging them to guess what it was. But even with a brief sketch of a foot, he found, the sharp youngsters would start whispering “elephant,” an animal Peet admits “might be up there pretty high” as his favorite creature to draw.

“Being a poor loser,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I resorted to trickery, and after starting a drawing of an animal they were sure to recognize, I’d switch to a different one. I might start with a rhino’s head with a horned snout and have them shouting ‘rhino! rhino!’ then quickly add moose horns, a shaggy lion’s mane, a giraffe’s neck, or whatever came to mind.”

Such a combination of rhino, giraffe, elephant, camel, zebra, reindeer and dog turned into a creature and book that Peet called “Whingdingdilly.” Peet usually ignores the children’s question about age, not because he is sensitive about his 75 years, but because he would rather get on to more interesting topics.

“A lot of them think I’m about 20,” he says. “Kids are so age-conscious, and they think anyone over 40 couldn’t be interested in lions, tigers and trains, or couldn’t draw pictures.”

Peet, whose 35th book was published last September and whose sketches are central to a dozen classic Walt Disney films, is at home and at work in a gray light-filled aerie high up in the Hollywood Hills where he has conjured and sketched his animals with the human personalities for 33 years.

In the pleasant family room adjoining the kitchen are the drop-leaf table and easy chair before the fireplace where he wrote and drew the most recent book, “Cock-a-Doodle Dudley,” and his 1989 “Bill Peet: An Autobiography.” The illustrated autobiography was named one of four Caldecott Honor Books this year by the American Library Assn. and also won him the Southern California Children’s Book Writer’s medal. It has been his best seller. But all of his books remain in print in several languages.

Peet created his first book, “Hubert’s Hair-Raising Adventure,” the tale of a lion with mane-growing problems, while his house was being framed around him. When “Hubert,” published in 1959, and four subsequent books proved successful, he quit as a Disney animator and story man in his mid-’40s and moved full time into his second career as an author.

“Sitting here on this hilltop,” he says, “I felt I was really starting over.”

Peet reluctantly displayed his studio over the garage, where he worked until about four years ago when the clutter forced him to move to the family room.

“I file everything under miscellaneous, “ he says, eyes twinkling with the humor that carries children through his books and makes them eager to read more.

The small room with sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills on one side and the San Fernando Valley on the other is lined with sketches of Peet’s lions, elephants, pigs and trains and drawings by his child fans. The floor is littered with boxes of scrolled story boards from the Disney days, and a couple of battered filing cabinets are stuffed with letters from young readers.

Margaret, his wife of 53 years, quickly suggests a move from the “miscellaneous” jumble into the airy living room.

There are none of Peet’s early oil paintings on the walls. He bartered them all, his wife explains, for rides and other services during the Depression when the two were students at Indianapolis’ Herron Art Institute. Later attempts to buy them back were unsuccessful.

Neither is the house lined with Peet’s many awards--ranging from the California Reading Assn. award for his body of work to the Annie Award for distinguished contribution to the art of animation. The modest Peet won’t permit it.

Born Jan. 29, 1915, in Grandview, Ind., a dot on the map on the Ohio River, Peet moved to Indianapolis at the age of 3. He grew up in painful poverty and family strife that he chooses not to dwell on and that his upbeat drawings and stories belie.

“One thing I just hated was to be without money,” he says. “It was a terrible feeling. It was embarrassing not to be able to go places, without even a dime. I hated that time in my life, in high school especially.”

What Peet loved was drawing. From the time he could hold a crayon, at the age of 4 or 5, he drew the trains that chugged through Indianapolis and the animals that traveled with circuses or roamed the fields at the edge of the city or on his grandfather’s farm in Southern Indiana.

“I loved the rustic backcountry of Indiana. The roads, barns, fields, woods, the creeks are in my books,” he says. “I often think how great it would be if I could be transported back there a couple of days a month and just soak it up.”

In high school, Peet won a scholarship to Herron Art Institute, now a part of Indiana University. There he met Margaret and realized he could support himself with the hobby he loved.

“My life really began there,” he says. “It was the break away from my dismal beginnings. I could see the light.”

Peet left Herron after three years and worked briefly at a greeting card company in Dayton, Ohio. But the pay was poor, and when he was assigned to illustrating sympathy cards, the man with the humorous twinkle in his eye headed west.

Signing on as an animator with Disney, he began a 27-year love-hate servitude to the difficult and demanding Walt Disney. Peet contributed his charming drawings and later story lines to a dozen Disney films as well as many other shorter television pieces. His favorites remain his drawings of the floppy-eared elephant “Dumbo,” his first work that earned Disney’s personal recognition, and “101 Dalmatians” and “The Sword in the Stone,” for which he drew the characters, wrote the screenplays and directed the actors’ voice performances.

Peet also helped create “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Cinderella,” “Peter Pan,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Fantasia” and “Song of the South.” He left Disney in 1964 during the creation of “Jungle Book” and asked that his name be stripped from the credits because he didn’t like changes that were made after he left the project, a kind of problem he attributes to group creation.

“You can’t have a collective idea about what is funny,” he says. “Creative work is a very personal thing. You have to have a single point of view.”

Peet says the Disney work never gave him the satisfaction he has found in his books. He always felt depressed when a new film came out; he feels good when a new book is published.

Working on a Disney animated film, he says, was an “assembly line” process, and all the credit floated to the top.

“Walt was very sensitive about credit. He would say ‘Dammit, we are all in this together,’ ” says Peet. “But what he meant was ‘the credit is all mine .’ I knew that we stood for Walter Elias (Disney’s first and middle names). Everything came out ‘Walt Disney presents’ and the rest of our names might as well have been in the phone book.”

Drawing came as naturally to Peet as breathing. Writing was hard work, but at Disney he quickly learned that the “story men” had more control over the final product than mere illustrators. Working into screenplays there, he decided the best way to gain total control over his work was to switch to books and write as well as illustrate the stories.

Although he didn’t become an author until they were adults, Peet began storytelling by making up bedtime tales for his sons, Bill Jr. and Steve. Now his grandchildren, Michael, 8, and Jennifer, 4, have him autograph his books as gifts to their friends.

He bought three textbooks about writing, but then discarded them as “ridiculous, saying obvious things.” What he needed to do, he decided, was just find an idea--the hardest work of all--and then tell a story about it, illustrating as he went along.

“You have to have something to say,” he says. “If you don’t have anything to write about, you are not a writer.”

Although Peet says he never wants to seem “preachy,” all of his books do have a message and teach children self-acceptance, how to get along with others, or some other useful lesson. In “Cyrus the Unsinkable Sea Serpent” (1975), Cyrus sets out to sink a ship and eat the passengers to avoid appearing “sissy.” But his innate kindness wins out and he defends the ship against pirates. No sissy at all, he shows that kindness is heroic.

In “Encore for Eleanor” (1981), the circus elephant is shipped to the zoo when she falls off her stilts and is believed too old to perform any more. But she overcomes the problem by sketching other animals, and soon wins her own show at the zoo, proving that one can compensate for any handicap.

A lovable moose and other big animals are saved by the tiny “Gnats of Knotty Pine” (1975) when the gnats swarm around hunters and drive them from the forest. The book shows that even the smallest, least significant creatures can accomplish great things when they band together.

“I can write and draw at the same time,” Peet says. “It is kind of a hodgepodge.”

“It is wonderful to see,” observes his best audience, Margaret, who typed his manuscripts on her card table until arthritis intervened a few years ago. “And you should see him when he draws--he becomes all the characters, with all the expressions on his face.”

Describing her life with the animator and author as “mostly wonderful,” Margaret says she has learned to ignore his changing moods during a book’s creation, give her honest opinion about his proposed story ideas, and wash the many colors of ink from his felt tip pens out of his clothes. (Her secret is hair spray.)

Her personal favorite Peet character is “Chester the Worldly Pig” (1965), to whom Peet likened himself in his autobiography because both were born in the rural Midwest and went off to see the world.

What delights Peet most about creating books, almost more than having total control and sole credit, is the feedback from his fans. At Disney, he says, the studio may have received letters from children, but he never saw them. For the last 30 years, he has received letters by the bundle shipped from Houghton-Mifflin, publisher of 34 of his books. (“Countdown to Christmas” was published by Children’s Press in 1972.)

Unlike many authors, he not only reads the letters, he answers them, often with tiny drawings of his animal characters. With the letters now coming by the thousands, he sometimes sends out Xeroxed replies and drawings, but he does try to respond.

Some of the letters he receives detail a child’s problems after divorce or the death of a parent, and Peet still tries to answer those personally.

“The misfit is one of my themes that probably reaches the kids the most,” he says. “We are all to some degree misfits.”

Until cancer cost Peet his left vocal cord and part of his larynx five years ago, he regularly visited elementary schools to talk and draw for children. Vowing never to retire and already playing with an idea for his 36th book, Peet doesn’t want to dwell on his health.

He made light of his first triple bypass heart surgery, which followed a heart attack in 1977, by likening himself to his drawing of old Eli the lion sprawled on his back playing dead to shoo hunters away. Weak after the surgery and with a only month to deadline on the book “Eli,” Peet was startled to discover he couldn’t draw. Slowly, he started crosshatching in pictures of weeds, and after three weeks of weeds, worked his way back to the lion and friendly vultures who helped Eli foil the hunters.

Last February, Peet had just shipped “Cock-a-Doodle Dudley” to the publisher when he had a second heart bypass surgery. Now his young readers again have his full attention.

Despite his many years in film, Peet has resisted overtures to turn his books into animated features. Part of the reason is the question of control, and part of it is that he simply wants to encourage today’s children to enjoy books as he did when he was a boy.

Although he admires children’s authors like E. B. White for “Charlotte’s Web,” Peet considers many of today’s children’s books “more of an art exhibit” with no story worth telling.

“My favorite compliment from the kids is ‘We think your books are funny and make us laugh,’ ” Peet says. “If you are trying to get kids to read, a book should be entertaining. If it isn’t fun, it becomes a chore.”

That he achieves his goal is evident in the letters he gets from teachers who say his books provide a breakthrough in teaching children to read, especially when English is a second language.

“Bill Peet’s stories are humorous and adventurous and longer than some of the picture books, so they really engage the children in reading,” says Janine Goodale, a children’s librarian with the Los Angeles Central Library for 18 years. She always puts Peet’s books on her recommended reading lists.

Although Peet worries that today’s children will forsake his books, and other books, for “pushing buttons” on video games and video tapes, Goodale says Peet’s books continue to “hold up well” with the high tech-oriented child.

“His books have a good story line. They aren’t all just pictures,” she says. “A Bill Peet book has a lot of action and humor and a good plot line. He makes the children--especially second-grade boys who aren’t always interested in reading--want to read. It is not drilling. It is an adventure.”